In recent years, a number of systems have been designed to provide pharmaceutical items at locations such as nursing stations in hospitals. By providing an inventory of medicine at such locations, these systems seek to reduce the requirement for nurses or pharmacy personnel to travel repeatedly between the nursing station and the pharmacy to acquire medicine and other pharmaceutical items. These systems also attempt to enhance the management of pharmaceutical items and the secure control of inventory. This is especially true of narcotics. Some examples of these systems include the Meditrol.RTM. Automated Dispensing System (Meditrol, Houston, Tex. 77036), the Sure-Med.RTM. (Baxter Healthcare, I. V. Systems Division, Deerfield, Ill. 60015), MEDSTATION.RTM. (Pyxis Corporation, San Diego, Calif. 92121) and Access (Lionville Systems, Inc., Exton, Pa. 19431).
Although these systems are, in many respects, adequate for their intended purpose, they are limited in other ways. Some of these systems store many identical articles together in batch in a single bin and then control bin access. When a user accesses a specific medication they are provided access to the contents of the entire bin. A disadvantage of this approach is that monitoring the specific number of articles removed from a bin by a user is difficult, if not impossible. This is due to the reliance of the system on each user to correctly and honestly report the number of articles he or she removed.
Another limitation of some of these devices is that single identical medications are loaded and stored in an array (linear or other) and then the user is then allowed access to the medicines in a fixed sequence. A limitation of arrays is that they contain identical medications. The problem with the resulting device is that to inventory a number of different medications, it is necessary to have an equal number of arrays. This follows from the sequential access limitation.
Other disadvantages of some of these devices include the requirement for the unpackaging of protective wraps on items to be dispensed, such as for prefilled syringes, before they are placed within the device. This unpackaging is a result of the inability of the device geometry to accommodate protective wraps and/or of the reliance of the device mechanism to hold some specific geometry of items to be dispensed, which the protective packaging inhibits.
Other designs provide the flexibility to access a number of medication types in a flexible format but do not offer controlled access to individual medications and pharmaceutical items.
As a result of these limitations, there is a need for a system capable of rapid and secure controlled access to pharmaceutical items including narcotics. Additionally, there is a need for a system that is not tied to a sequential, batch, or unit dose packaging format which limit flexibility and are not space efficient. There is a need for a system that provides for complete and controlled flexibility and random access to a variety of medications, including syringes, and also provide for a flexible inventory management capability. The unit should be simple to operate, so that the nursing staff may retrieve a required item. The unit should be simple and efficient to load. The unit should also be space efficient and cost effective so that the hospitals or other facilities can place them strategically and afford to use them.